October 18, 2022
Dear Friends and Family,
Without doubt, one of the greatest travesties of the pandemic is what school closures did to our children. Not only did most miss a year’s worth of education, but many also lost associated socialization and nutritional lunches. Further some experienced abuse consequences. To make it worse, the closures, particularly for the 2020 – 2021 school year, were unnecessary as evidence from many other countries and the State of Florida proved.
The villains for the travesty are primarily the teacher’s unions whose objectives were both self and politically motivated. The union leadership had little concern for the children and their well-being. Sad, indeed.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Without doubt, one of the greatest travesties of the pandemic is what school closures did to our children. Not only did most miss a year’s worth of education, but many also lost associated socialization and nutritional lunches. Further some experienced abuse consequences. To make it worse, the closures, particularly for the 2020 – 2021 school year, were unnecessary as evidence from many other countries and the State of Florida proved.
The villains for the travesty are primarily the teacher’s unions whose objectives were both self and politically motivated. The union leadership had little concern for the children and their well-being. Sad, indeed.
Happy Learning,
Harley
COVID PANDEMIC CRITIQUE – SEGMENT 10
SCHOOLS – EXCERPTS
KINDERGARTEN THROUGH TWELFTH GRADE: The school closures weighed most on kids. Few schools had experience with remote learning. Even high-functioning suburban and private schools had to devise curricula and setup virtual classrooms on the fly. Many bigger urban districts – with slow-moving bureaucracies and powerful unions – barely tried at all during the spring. In cities where public schools barely functioned for many students under normal circumstances, closures effectively ended education.
Many other countries responded to the problems by reopening quickly, especially kindergartens and elementary schools. Liberal European countries with centralized educational systems were among the first to move. Denmark and Switzerland led the way, and Germany quickly followed. By May, Japan and other Asian countries had also partly reopened. Most countries initially required masks and strict physical distancing restrictions, but over time the rules loosened. The push to reopen increased as sophisticated contact tracing showed that children rarely spread the coronavirus to one another or adults. A French study published on April 11, 2020, was among the first to provide hard evidence. In May, Chinese researchers reported, “There has been no evidence revealing the virus was transmitted from children to others. “Data from the Netherlands, which had sophisticated contact tracing, showed the same.”
Further, as more children were exposed, hospital and death reports showed they were at even lower risk than scientists had first believed. Kids almost never died from the coronavirus. A British report in 2021 showed that the odds that a healthy British child or teen would die of Covid during the first year of the pandemic were about 1 in 2,000,000.
Beginning in May, the New York Times published more than a dozen articles on the “post-Covid inflammatory syndrome” that was supposedly targeting kids. Article after article followed. As usual, the rest of the media quickly followed the Times lead. By summer, many American parents believed, falsely, that the coronavirus was highly risky to their children. Teachers’ unions took advantage of the fear and confusion to lead a drive against in-person school re-openings. At first, they simply wanted to keep public schools closed through spring 2020. But by June, the unions were hinting they would try to keep schools closed at least through the fall. They began to emphasize the risk to teachers, ignoring the reality that a study out of Sweden, where schools had remained open had shown teachers were at no more risk than the average adult. Later studies showed that teachers were actually safer with schools open, because the children were so unlikely to spread the virus. Yet the growing evidence base, and international re-openings didn’t matter in the U.S. By late June, many cities and states, especially those run by Democratic mayors and governors, backed away from in-person schooling for the 2020-2021 school year. Then the president got involved. I hoped having the White House push to reopen the schools might make a difference. It did. For the worse.
Teachers’ unions became even more opposed to re-openings. They called for massively expensive retrofitting of schools with new ventilations systems. They said publicly funded charter schools should be closed. The Los Angeles teachers’ union even insisted the police be partially defunded as a condition of reopening. “We must shift the astronomical amount of money devoted to policing to education and other essential needs,” the union demanded. The unions’ demands were utterly unrealistic. Even if the federal government had authorized the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary for retrofitting schools, the work could not have been completed in a few weeks or months. The impossibility of the demands was probably intentional. In essence, they were a way to ensure that schools could not reopen.
Rather than calling out the unions, journalists abetted them. As the summer progressed, the media rarely reported that the schools had opened all over the world without incident. By the summer, many American parents had fears about schools and Covid’s risks to their kids that verged on fictional. And the union pressure was unrelenting. To maximize their leverage, local teachers’ unions threatened strikes and encouraged teachers to seek disability leaves. Some locals even encouraged members to write wills, as if being forced to teach in-person would be a death sentence. The teachers won.
The only major exceptions were in a few Republican states, including Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis had ordered schools to open in-person despite objections from the state’s teachers’ union. In September 2020, only about 25% of schools nationally were open for in-person learning. For the entire 2020-2021 school year, 15 states, including Virginia and New Jersey, offered in-person instruction for an average of less than half the year. Other big states, including Pennsylvania, New York, and Michigan, barely cracked 50%. California, home to about 1 in 8 of all American children, was worst of all, offering barely 20% of its student in-person education. Even those dismal figures overstated the number of students who were actually in school.
By the end of the 2021 school year, the extent of the damage from online schooling was clear. In Texas, most schools – especially in rural areas – stayed open. But enough had been closed for the state’s standardized tests to capture a huge gap between in-person and virtual education. The state reported in June 2021 that the number of students who met math benchmarks had fallen by 32% in districts that were more than three-quarters online. The decline was only 9% for districts that were less than one-quarter online. For reading benchmarks, the declines were 9% and 1%. Black and Hispanic kids were especially hit hard.
By then, virtual schooling had become so unpopular that the unions that had desperately tried to keep schools closed the year before claimed they had done nothing of the sort. “Nothing should stand in the way of fully reopening schools this fall and keeping them open,” In a tweet, Randi Weingarten claimed her union had “tried to reopen schools safely since April 2020. Tens of millions of American children had lost more than a year of school they’d never get back.
Source: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021).
The costs of school closures are high, both for children and parents. A Brown University study found that spring 2020 schools closures resulted in a significant loss of educational progress, with children estimated to attain only 63 to 68% of the gains in reading proficiency made during a normal school year, and 37 to 50% of gains in mathematics. Students with learning disabilities or from disadvantaged home environments were particularly hard hit by the closures. Also, many parents depend on schools to care for their children while they are working and can’t afford alternative arrangements.
Educational development aside, the anxiety and social isolation adults were experiencing were amplified in our children as they were separated from their teachers, friends, and daily routines. Children thrive with structure, an essential component of their lives that was stripped away. A survey of more than 6,000 parents and children in the U.S., the U.K., and other countries that came out in early May, as most spring semesters were coming to an end found about 25% of children living under COVID-19 lockdowns were showing some level of anxiety and were at risk of depression. The survey found that 49% of interviewed children in the U.S. said they were worried, while 34% reported feeling scared, and 27% felt anxious.
On September 15, 2020, the CDC recommended that schools open for in-person learning. In August 2020, Dr. Fauci also said that schools could safely reopen with precautions. Yet, by mid-August, the majority of schools had no reopening plans. The schools closed six months earlier; why hadn’t preparations begun the day after they closed? Against the best available general scientific advice, school systems across the country chose not to reopen to in-person schooling in the fall. Why would they do this when they knew going to school for children is so much more than just the fundamental basics of education?
Further, the CDC proclaimed, “Extended school closure is harmful to children. It can lead to severe learning loss.” It notes as well that “disparities in educational outcomes caused by school closures are a particular concern for low-income and minority students and students with disabilities.” And yet, unions and public officials, like the L.A. Country health director who said schools won’t go back until after the election, were stopping children from reentering the classroom. Well into 2021, teachers’ unions continued with their demands, now in the form of refusing to return to in-person education until teachers were vaccinated. However, the newly appointed CDC director Dr. Walensky, said “There is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen, and that safe reopening does not suggest teachers need to be vaccinated in order to open safely.” It was clear the decisions to reopen (or not) were not being led by science.
Source: Panic Attack by Nicole Saphier, MD (2021)
For children, COVID was far less serious than in adults, even less serious than the common flu. By all logic, I repeatedly said, “if we are going to close schools for this, then we would need to close schools for influenza, too – every year for the flu season, have everyone wear masks during flu season, have every child separated by six feet for flu season.” Of course, that had never been recommended, despite the fact that hundreds of children died annually from the flu, a far higher percentage that from COVID, according to CDC, and children were a significant source of transmitted influenza, a disease that killed tens of thousands of high-risk elderlies every year. The bottom line was this: America was uniquely hysterical in its disregard of actual data on schools and children, more off the rails than almost anywhere in the world.
Teachers’ unions were instrumental in paralyzing parents with fear by lying about the danger in schools. And beyond the extremely low risk to kids, the vast majority of teachers themselves are not even in the high-risk group. I point out the facts – that public K-12 teachers are a young profession, with a median 41 years of age. A full 92% are under sixty. To me, this was a sin, a total breakdown of the moral contract between a civilization and its children. I asked myself, “Where are the teachers? Where are the parents? We countered the outrageous lie being perpetrated by the teacher unions that schools somehow represented a danger. We cited data from CDC stating: “Of the first 68,998 U.S. deaths from COVID-19, only 12 have been in children under age 14 – less than 0.02%. Nor is coronavirus killing teenagers. At last count, the fatality total among children under 18 without an underlying condition is one; only 10 of the 16,469 confirmed coronavirus deaths in New York City were among those under the age of 18.
We wrote that online education was a failure, a fact that was only validated further as more data came in. For example, we reported that in Boston, only half of students were showing up for online instruction on any given day, and 20% had never logged on to the designated website. And that failure was especially impacting low-income kids. “Many lack WIFI, computer tablets, software and other paraphernalia of the affluent.” Meanwhile serious health harms to kids, who had no significant risk from the illness itself, were being created by school closures. What parent or teacher didn’t fully understand that children were being denied “opportunities for social and emotional development that come with play, exercise, sports and socialization”?
Source: A Plague Upon Our House by Scott W. Atlas, MD (2021).
UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES: The educational insanity didn’t stop at high school graduation. Colleges and universities raced to implement the most draconian possible restrictions against their students, all in the name of protecting them. Online instruction was only the first step. Many colleges kept students from returning to campus at all. The schools that did allow students on campus did everything possible to make them regret coming. They barred visitors. They forced students to wear masks – not just in group settings but alone in their rooms and outdoors. They banned gatherings of more than six people, effectively ending the extracurricular clubs and activities crucial to the college experience. Some required students to notify administrators or even ask permission to travel off campus.
By August, the debate about intercollegiate athletics and particularly college football had, inevitably, become politicized. In the end, though a handful of games were postponed or canceled, the college football season went forward. Other sports did too. The predicted deaths did not occur. I have not found a single report of a college athlete dying from a Covid infection that followed competition or practice. Naturally, the media never acknowledged that Covid had proven far less dangerous to athletes than it had warned. The fiasco over athletics was a microcosm of the way colleges and universities dealt with Covid.
The obsession with minimizing Covid’s risks seemed to produce similar effects on an entire generation of young people. Anxiety levels among teens and young adults skyrocketed. The CDC found that in February and March 2021, visits to emergency rooms for suicide attempts by adolescent girls rose 50% compared to the same period in 2019. For boys, attempts rose 3%.
Still, as the fall semester continued, universities only tightened their rules, despite the fact almost no students had been hospitalized or died after hundreds of thousands of positive tests. Despite their anger, students and parents went along. Enrollment among first-year students fell 16%, as those who had a choice decided to take the year off. But the vast majority of students had little choice but to accept the rules. Overall enrollment fell only 4%, meaning almost all sophomores, juniors, or seniors returned. Few wanted to jeopardize their education or risk being expelled. Once again, the bureaucrats and lawyers had won.
Source: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021)
Only 0.2% of the first 164,280 deaths catalogued by the CDC had been in those under 25 years old. For those 18 to 29, that risk is 90 times less than for those 65 to 75 and 630 times less than for those 85 and older. I noted that hospitalization rates for those 18 to 29 are very small compared to older age groups. Few university faculty members were elderly, since two-thirds are under 55, and only 13% are older than 65. The risk to that age group is very low, and the campus was one of the lowest risk environments one could imagine. I said, we should devote as many resources as possible to protect the high-risk people directly – targeted protection – and stop destroying the health and livelihoods of everyone else.
Source: A Plague Upon Our House by Scott W. Atlas, MD (2021)
SCHOOLS – EXCERPTS
KINDERGARTEN THROUGH TWELFTH GRADE: The school closures weighed most on kids. Few schools had experience with remote learning. Even high-functioning suburban and private schools had to devise curricula and setup virtual classrooms on the fly. Many bigger urban districts – with slow-moving bureaucracies and powerful unions – barely tried at all during the spring. In cities where public schools barely functioned for many students under normal circumstances, closures effectively ended education.
Many other countries responded to the problems by reopening quickly, especially kindergartens and elementary schools. Liberal European countries with centralized educational systems were among the first to move. Denmark and Switzerland led the way, and Germany quickly followed. By May, Japan and other Asian countries had also partly reopened. Most countries initially required masks and strict physical distancing restrictions, but over time the rules loosened. The push to reopen increased as sophisticated contact tracing showed that children rarely spread the coronavirus to one another or adults. A French study published on April 11, 2020, was among the first to provide hard evidence. In May, Chinese researchers reported, “There has been no evidence revealing the virus was transmitted from children to others. “Data from the Netherlands, which had sophisticated contact tracing, showed the same.”
Further, as more children were exposed, hospital and death reports showed they were at even lower risk than scientists had first believed. Kids almost never died from the coronavirus. A British report in 2021 showed that the odds that a healthy British child or teen would die of Covid during the first year of the pandemic were about 1 in 2,000,000.
Beginning in May, the New York Times published more than a dozen articles on the “post-Covid inflammatory syndrome” that was supposedly targeting kids. Article after article followed. As usual, the rest of the media quickly followed the Times lead. By summer, many American parents believed, falsely, that the coronavirus was highly risky to their children. Teachers’ unions took advantage of the fear and confusion to lead a drive against in-person school re-openings. At first, they simply wanted to keep public schools closed through spring 2020. But by June, the unions were hinting they would try to keep schools closed at least through the fall. They began to emphasize the risk to teachers, ignoring the reality that a study out of Sweden, where schools had remained open had shown teachers were at no more risk than the average adult. Later studies showed that teachers were actually safer with schools open, because the children were so unlikely to spread the virus. Yet the growing evidence base, and international re-openings didn’t matter in the U.S. By late June, many cities and states, especially those run by Democratic mayors and governors, backed away from in-person schooling for the 2020-2021 school year. Then the president got involved. I hoped having the White House push to reopen the schools might make a difference. It did. For the worse.
Teachers’ unions became even more opposed to re-openings. They called for massively expensive retrofitting of schools with new ventilations systems. They said publicly funded charter schools should be closed. The Los Angeles teachers’ union even insisted the police be partially defunded as a condition of reopening. “We must shift the astronomical amount of money devoted to policing to education and other essential needs,” the union demanded. The unions’ demands were utterly unrealistic. Even if the federal government had authorized the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary for retrofitting schools, the work could not have been completed in a few weeks or months. The impossibility of the demands was probably intentional. In essence, they were a way to ensure that schools could not reopen.
Rather than calling out the unions, journalists abetted them. As the summer progressed, the media rarely reported that the schools had opened all over the world without incident. By the summer, many American parents had fears about schools and Covid’s risks to their kids that verged on fictional. And the union pressure was unrelenting. To maximize their leverage, local teachers’ unions threatened strikes and encouraged teachers to seek disability leaves. Some locals even encouraged members to write wills, as if being forced to teach in-person would be a death sentence. The teachers won.
The only major exceptions were in a few Republican states, including Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis had ordered schools to open in-person despite objections from the state’s teachers’ union. In September 2020, only about 25% of schools nationally were open for in-person learning. For the entire 2020-2021 school year, 15 states, including Virginia and New Jersey, offered in-person instruction for an average of less than half the year. Other big states, including Pennsylvania, New York, and Michigan, barely cracked 50%. California, home to about 1 in 8 of all American children, was worst of all, offering barely 20% of its student in-person education. Even those dismal figures overstated the number of students who were actually in school.
By the end of the 2021 school year, the extent of the damage from online schooling was clear. In Texas, most schools – especially in rural areas – stayed open. But enough had been closed for the state’s standardized tests to capture a huge gap between in-person and virtual education. The state reported in June 2021 that the number of students who met math benchmarks had fallen by 32% in districts that were more than three-quarters online. The decline was only 9% for districts that were less than one-quarter online. For reading benchmarks, the declines were 9% and 1%. Black and Hispanic kids were especially hit hard.
By then, virtual schooling had become so unpopular that the unions that had desperately tried to keep schools closed the year before claimed they had done nothing of the sort. “Nothing should stand in the way of fully reopening schools this fall and keeping them open,” In a tweet, Randi Weingarten claimed her union had “tried to reopen schools safely since April 2020. Tens of millions of American children had lost more than a year of school they’d never get back.
Source: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021).
The costs of school closures are high, both for children and parents. A Brown University study found that spring 2020 schools closures resulted in a significant loss of educational progress, with children estimated to attain only 63 to 68% of the gains in reading proficiency made during a normal school year, and 37 to 50% of gains in mathematics. Students with learning disabilities or from disadvantaged home environments were particularly hard hit by the closures. Also, many parents depend on schools to care for their children while they are working and can’t afford alternative arrangements.
Educational development aside, the anxiety and social isolation adults were experiencing were amplified in our children as they were separated from their teachers, friends, and daily routines. Children thrive with structure, an essential component of their lives that was stripped away. A survey of more than 6,000 parents and children in the U.S., the U.K., and other countries that came out in early May, as most spring semesters were coming to an end found about 25% of children living under COVID-19 lockdowns were showing some level of anxiety and were at risk of depression. The survey found that 49% of interviewed children in the U.S. said they were worried, while 34% reported feeling scared, and 27% felt anxious.
On September 15, 2020, the CDC recommended that schools open for in-person learning. In August 2020, Dr. Fauci also said that schools could safely reopen with precautions. Yet, by mid-August, the majority of schools had no reopening plans. The schools closed six months earlier; why hadn’t preparations begun the day after they closed? Against the best available general scientific advice, school systems across the country chose not to reopen to in-person schooling in the fall. Why would they do this when they knew going to school for children is so much more than just the fundamental basics of education?
Further, the CDC proclaimed, “Extended school closure is harmful to children. It can lead to severe learning loss.” It notes as well that “disparities in educational outcomes caused by school closures are a particular concern for low-income and minority students and students with disabilities.” And yet, unions and public officials, like the L.A. Country health director who said schools won’t go back until after the election, were stopping children from reentering the classroom. Well into 2021, teachers’ unions continued with their demands, now in the form of refusing to return to in-person education until teachers were vaccinated. However, the newly appointed CDC director Dr. Walensky, said “There is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen, and that safe reopening does not suggest teachers need to be vaccinated in order to open safely.” It was clear the decisions to reopen (or not) were not being led by science.
Source: Panic Attack by Nicole Saphier, MD (2021)
For children, COVID was far less serious than in adults, even less serious than the common flu. By all logic, I repeatedly said, “if we are going to close schools for this, then we would need to close schools for influenza, too – every year for the flu season, have everyone wear masks during flu season, have every child separated by six feet for flu season.” Of course, that had never been recommended, despite the fact that hundreds of children died annually from the flu, a far higher percentage that from COVID, according to CDC, and children were a significant source of transmitted influenza, a disease that killed tens of thousands of high-risk elderlies every year. The bottom line was this: America was uniquely hysterical in its disregard of actual data on schools and children, more off the rails than almost anywhere in the world.
Teachers’ unions were instrumental in paralyzing parents with fear by lying about the danger in schools. And beyond the extremely low risk to kids, the vast majority of teachers themselves are not even in the high-risk group. I point out the facts – that public K-12 teachers are a young profession, with a median 41 years of age. A full 92% are under sixty. To me, this was a sin, a total breakdown of the moral contract between a civilization and its children. I asked myself, “Where are the teachers? Where are the parents? We countered the outrageous lie being perpetrated by the teacher unions that schools somehow represented a danger. We cited data from CDC stating: “Of the first 68,998 U.S. deaths from COVID-19, only 12 have been in children under age 14 – less than 0.02%. Nor is coronavirus killing teenagers. At last count, the fatality total among children under 18 without an underlying condition is one; only 10 of the 16,469 confirmed coronavirus deaths in New York City were among those under the age of 18.
We wrote that online education was a failure, a fact that was only validated further as more data came in. For example, we reported that in Boston, only half of students were showing up for online instruction on any given day, and 20% had never logged on to the designated website. And that failure was especially impacting low-income kids. “Many lack WIFI, computer tablets, software and other paraphernalia of the affluent.” Meanwhile serious health harms to kids, who had no significant risk from the illness itself, were being created by school closures. What parent or teacher didn’t fully understand that children were being denied “opportunities for social and emotional development that come with play, exercise, sports and socialization”?
Source: A Plague Upon Our House by Scott W. Atlas, MD (2021).
UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES: The educational insanity didn’t stop at high school graduation. Colleges and universities raced to implement the most draconian possible restrictions against their students, all in the name of protecting them. Online instruction was only the first step. Many colleges kept students from returning to campus at all. The schools that did allow students on campus did everything possible to make them regret coming. They barred visitors. They forced students to wear masks – not just in group settings but alone in their rooms and outdoors. They banned gatherings of more than six people, effectively ending the extracurricular clubs and activities crucial to the college experience. Some required students to notify administrators or even ask permission to travel off campus.
By August, the debate about intercollegiate athletics and particularly college football had, inevitably, become politicized. In the end, though a handful of games were postponed or canceled, the college football season went forward. Other sports did too. The predicted deaths did not occur. I have not found a single report of a college athlete dying from a Covid infection that followed competition or practice. Naturally, the media never acknowledged that Covid had proven far less dangerous to athletes than it had warned. The fiasco over athletics was a microcosm of the way colleges and universities dealt with Covid.
The obsession with minimizing Covid’s risks seemed to produce similar effects on an entire generation of young people. Anxiety levels among teens and young adults skyrocketed. The CDC found that in February and March 2021, visits to emergency rooms for suicide attempts by adolescent girls rose 50% compared to the same period in 2019. For boys, attempts rose 3%.
Still, as the fall semester continued, universities only tightened their rules, despite the fact almost no students had been hospitalized or died after hundreds of thousands of positive tests. Despite their anger, students and parents went along. Enrollment among first-year students fell 16%, as those who had a choice decided to take the year off. But the vast majority of students had little choice but to accept the rules. Overall enrollment fell only 4%, meaning almost all sophomores, juniors, or seniors returned. Few wanted to jeopardize their education or risk being expelled. Once again, the bureaucrats and lawyers had won.
Source: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021)
Only 0.2% of the first 164,280 deaths catalogued by the CDC had been in those under 25 years old. For those 18 to 29, that risk is 90 times less than for those 65 to 75 and 630 times less than for those 85 and older. I noted that hospitalization rates for those 18 to 29 are very small compared to older age groups. Few university faculty members were elderly, since two-thirds are under 55, and only 13% are older than 65. The risk to that age group is very low, and the campus was one of the lowest risk environments one could imagine. I said, we should devote as many resources as possible to protect the high-risk people directly – targeted protection – and stop destroying the health and livelihoods of everyone else.
Source: A Plague Upon Our House by Scott W. Atlas, MD (2021)
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